For weeks, Secretary of the Treasury Steven Mnuchin has been touting a rosy macroeconomic analysis of the Republican tax plan, an analysis that has never materialized and now appears to never having been done. Two weeks ago, he told the Wall Street Journal that the analysis was done and that it was Treasury's "view is that this will pay for itself." The The New York Times' Alan Rappeport exposes the lie.
Those inside Treasury’s Office of Tax Policy, which Mr. Mnuchin has credited with running the models, say they have been largely shut out of the process and are not working on the type of detailed analysis that he has mentioned. An economist at the Office of Tax Analysis, who spoke on the condition of anonymity so as not to jeopardize his job, said Treasury had not released a “dynamic” analysis showing that the tax plan would be paid for with economic growth because one did not exist.
Instead of conducting full analyses of tax proposals, staff members have been running numbers on individual provisions or policy ideas, like lowering the tax rate on so-called pass-through businesses and figuring out how many family farms would benefit from the repeal of the estate tax. Activity has picked up more recently as Treasury has sought to provide technical assistance to the Joint Committee on Taxation and the Congressional Budget Office for their estimates.
A Treasury official said that there was not sufficient time to produce a full analysis with growth and revenue estimates of the final bill, which the Senate Finance Committee passed before Thanksgiving. […]
"This administration's top salesmen spent months trying to con the American people into buying false claims about their tax plan," said Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, the top Democrat on the Finance Committee. "Treasury has broken this promise intentionally and know the truth would sink this scam once and for all. They're doing everything they can to cover up Republicans' middle-class tax hike."
That includes lying to members of Congress about the existence of this analysis. They've been stringing along skeptical Republican Sen. Bob Corker, the self-proclaimed deficit hawk, for weeks. But he's working hard to convince himself that they're working hard to get this analysis to him. "I don’t know, I think they still have some work to do," he said after a meeting with Treasury officials. "They came over, had a very nice meeting, but there’s no modeling yet."
The voting starts today because last night, the Republicans voted unanimously to go forward on this bill, knowing from every other analysis and because we've been down this road before that these massive cuts are not going to pay for themselves and that an analysis from Treasury saying otherwise is never going to materialize. Because there is no professional analyst at Treasury who could possibly say otherwise and live with themselves.
Senators Collins, Corker, Flake, Johnson, McCain, and Murkowksi? All we need are THREE of these Republicans to stop the worst GOP Tax Scam, and the Senate is voting any day. Call your senators at (202) 224-3121 and tell them to vote "no."
